Wound

The way Susan Purdue sees it, the patricide she’s been planning for so long isn’t just an act of revenge, it’s a necessity. The rotten soul will pay for his unpardonable, incestuous transgressions against his daughter when she was just a child. But once her dad is good and buried in the backyard, Susan doesn’t find the closure she anticipated. Tormented by a host of demons and trapped in a dead-end job, she slides quietly into a deep madness that blurs the distinction between her banal reality and her nightmarish, sadomasochistic fantasies. To survive, she submits herself to a strict dominator for whom the worst tortures are the same as the most gentle caresses.

Tanya would be a pretty unremarkable teen if not for the identity crisis that has gnawed inside her for so long. Adopted at birth, she ties her troubles in life to the fact that she has no idea who her true parents are. One afternoon, her therapist gives her what she has always wanted— confidential documents from the orphanage at which she was so cruelly abandoned. While the dossier doesn’t identify her father, her mother’s name is marked down as Susan Purdue. The destinies of these two women will cross, leading them both into a parallel world of unearthly creatures of flesh and latex, a place where the most shocking perversions are realized. Tanya and Susan, each other’s mirror image, will have to face themselves. Abandon hope, all who enter here.

New Zealand filmmaker David Blyth’s (Death Warmed Up, Red Blooded American Girl) highly anticipated return to fiction explores his themes anew, transposed to the screen like a lucid fever dream. Blyth punctuates this journey with violent images as bizarre as they are disturbing, from a painful castration to an unusually grotesque birth. Bewitching and phantasmagorical, dangerous and amazing, Wound will leave its mark on you.

— Simon Laperrière, Fantasia International Film Festival

(Translation: Rupert Bottenberg)

PLAYING WITH

L’INSECTE
Matthieu Arsenault
17 min.

A disturbed and repellent man wants the love of a woman he doesn’t know.